Linux Kernel in a Nutshell

ketchup

ketchup is a very handy tool used to update or switch between different versions of the Linux kernel source tree. It has the ability to:

• Find the latest version of the kernel, download it, and uncompress it.

• Update a currently installed version of the kernel source tree to any other version, by patching the tree to the proper version.

• Handle the different development and stable branches of the kernel tree, including the -mm and -stable trees.

• Download any patches or tarballs needed to do the update, if they are not present on the machine already.

• Check the GPG signatures of the tarball and patches to verify that it has downloaded a correct file.

ketchup can be found at http://www.selenic.com/ketchup/ and has lots of additional documentation in the wiki at http://www.selenic.com/ketchup/wiki/. .

Here is a set of steps that show how simple it is to use ketchup to download a specific kernel version, and then have it switch the directory to another kernel version with only a minimal number of commands.

To have ketchup download the 2.6.16.24 version of the kernel source tree into a directory, and rename the directory to be the same as the kernel version, enter:

$ mkdir foo
$ cd foo
$ ketchup -r 2.6.16.24
None -> 2.6.16.24
Unpacking linux-2.6.17.tar.bz2
Applying patch-2.6.17.bz2 -R
Applying patch-2.6.16.24.bz2
Current directory renamed to /home/gregkh/linux/linux-2.6.16.24

Now, to upgrade this kernel to contain the latest stable kernel version, just enter:

$ ketchup -r 2.6 2.6.16.24 -> ...